User:Mirjam Dissel/writing assignment
Man on a Beach, Posing
WHAT
I recreated the narrative in a Dutch private photo album from the late 1920's, by replacing the pictures with a matching description typed in dymo tape. The removed pictures are hung in frames on the wall, themed together. The story in the album starts out plain and descriptive, the page is almost black, except for two small descriptions like "man on a beach, posing. boat in sea.". The reader does not know anything about the people starring in these pictures. As you go on the story gets more informative, more background information is revealed: what beach actually is visited, where the depicted mill stood, character development and through that the relationship between the characters are also shared. The reader gets to know the names of the characters and towards the end, the point of view shifts between the protagonists.
HOW
I bought an old photo album on marktplaats.nl (a dutch craigslist.com, for selling second hand items). I started looking at the pictures and investigating them closer. With online research, consulting other people and prior knowledge, I found out the basics: the visited places in the pictures and the possible relationships between characters. Because of the multiple events I could read the pictures as a story. I took out the pictures and hung them in frames, themed together bases on my story. In the now empty album I took my own journey of discovery as an example (as opposed to giving the reader the full story right away) and in the beginning I placed only a little bit of text and in the end when the story climaxes there is a lot. I typed the narrative I constructed in about 26 meters of black dymo tape (punch letters in plastic tape).
WHY
Pictures in private photo albums function as placeholders for complex and rich
memories that are activated when we see these pictures. Abandoned photo albums have something sad about them, because there is nobody left whose memory could be activated anymore by these pictures.
I wanted to let people think about memory and remembering, every time you look at a picture and remember the event, you are recreating it in your mind, this is highly connected to imagination. With the pictures taken out of my bought album and replaced by dymo tape, there is only a textual description visible and you start imagining the story on the fantastic visualizations you have created in your mind.
So by making up an entire story that could be called 'memory', I am re-activating the album by re-connecting it to a potential memory. It could be the story told by the pictures. The story could also be different - we simply don‘t know. The narrative that is unfolding in Man on a Beach, is posing hints at the fact that these photos do tell a story, even if it is different to the one told.
Tumblrsaurus V2.0
WHAT
In its current state, the Tumblrsaurus works in a browser and has a mainpage where a user can insert his/her username and click submit. This triggers a script that runs trough all their posted photos, which I will call their 'collection'. The output is another page, where on the left a slideshow of your own collection is visible, and on the right 3 other users are visible, with their latest photo posts shown in a column (so, three columns are shown on the right). These three users have a collection that is an ultimate match to yours. At first glance, each individual picture does not have too much in common with the other pictures (colours, subjects, shapes might be of a totally different kind), but each Tumblr user has a specific taste in pictures, which makes their collection as a whole unique and cohesive. Tumblrsaurus is designed to find matching interests based on communication (as opposed to keyword search or image comparison), therefore it finds matching collections and images that somehow seem to have something to do with each other, even though one picture could be featuring a sparkling horse and the other a nuclear disaster.
HOW
WHY
Desert of Sine
WHAT
From a computer a user can upload any (webcam) image to the server and the computer will turn it into a 1 minute loud futuristic sound using sine waves. This plays through a speaker set. At the same moment a microphone connected to the same computer will record that sound again with background noises present, and transform it back into an image. This way the image will show the interference during the transformation, capturing time and space of the surroundings. The resulting images are black and white and grainy all over, with peaks here and there. They are uploaded to the internet and shown on another screen simultaneously.
HOW
WHY